6 Conversations You Never Thought You’d Have With Your Neighbors But Do

6 Conversations You Never Thought You’d Have With Your Neighbors But Do
Nov 25, 2013 By Margaux Schreurs , eChinacities.com

When living in a hutong in which the majority of residents are older Beijing couples, it is not uncommon to have some incredibly interesting and unexpected exchanges of ideas with your neighbors. Although some of the questions or queries have been easy to answer and explain, language and culture barriers can create many awkward moments. Here are six examples of such awkward conversations that I’ve had with my neighbors. If you haven’t had exactly the same, you’ve probably had some equally interesting and unusual exchanges.


Source: lyng883

1) Marriage, relationships and family life
The topic of marriage is an extremely common fascination within Chinese society, and marrying young is expected. Living with two females, our male flat mate is constantly being asked by various neighbors whether he is married to us. At one point, one of our older male neighbors even implied that he was married to both of us, and seemed extremely impressed. Following this conversation, we frequently have had to stress that we are not married (in any combination of the three of us), which poses even more troubling questions from our neighbors in regards to the number of rooms in our flat.

Once the neighbors have established that we are not married nor living in the same rooms, they generally voice concern over how we can live this way; this is due to our being ripe for marriage yet still remaining single. Especially for women, it is normal for older Chinese people to display empathy following the discovery that you are single.

Initially, I thought I would not get used to it, but now it seems out of the ordinary to have a conversation with Chinese people and not have a mutual understanding with regards to each others’ marriage status.

2) From “nihao” to “how politically stable is your country” in less than a minute
A second common topic of conversation is with regards to nationality. When some of our neighbors see us emerge from the building, they generally seem awkward and do not acknowledge us. However, following an exchange of ‘nihao’ in the correct tones, they excitedly start chatting to you about where you are from and what language they speak in your home country.

Originally being from Holland, I often get a run-down of the last ten years’ football history, including a lot of football players and coaches whose Chinese names I do not know, or sometimes my neighbors talk about windmills or tulips.

However, some of the time, within less than a minute of conversation the topic will have switched towards politics, and whether my country is politically or economically stable, and whether we will be able to survive the current economic crisis.

3) Haggling over the value of your recyclable garbage
Chinese cities, although they may not initially appear to be, are incredibly good at recycling.

After replacing our metal security bars, the old scrap metal was left on the street. Instead of angry neighbors, we got a whole group of neighbors asking us whether it would be okay for them to take this metal and sell it to a metal recycling man. This demonstrates a crucial difference between China and Europe: in Europe you would not be popular in your community if you left your metal on the street and you would have to pay to have it removed, here leaving scrap metal on the street will suddenly give you many friends and you might even get paid to have it taken away.  And following some haggling over how much money we got to keep, and how much money they wanted and thought they could make of it, the ‘scrap metal man’ arrived, and took it all away on the back of a motorcycle.

4) Weight and Health Concerns
An extremely popular topic of conversation is weight, often encountered by women who are not as skinny as the average Chinese girl. Although I was aware of this, I did not expect to be questioned about my dinner habits by my retired Chinese neighbors following our conversation about where I was going that evening.

Making things even more awkward is the fact that, because of the accessibility of cheap restaurants in the neighborhood, our neighbors often see us dining at restaurants, often leading to more questions about my weight and more concern for my health.

5) The Validity of Multi-Culturalism
Following the discovery that we are three people of three different nationalities living in the same building, we were asked by many different neighbors how this was possible, why we chose to do this, and how we can communicate since we all come from countries that speak different languages.

One of our neighbors even wondered whether our household was a little bit like the United Nations Headquarters, separated by factions and slow at making important decisions.

6) Needing to Say “No”
There have been many occasions when we have had to just walk away from pushy suggestions or conversations because it has been too troublesome to explain the counter argument.

One of our neighbors frequently bangs on the fence to our patio with her walking stick when we are putting up laundry, shouting the predicted weather reports at us. She will then recite our usual weekend routine, pushing us to understand that we are will not be home in time to take our laundry inside if it does start to rain.

On top of this, many of our and our fellow expats’ neighbors like to take a look inside our house when we are coming or going, and start firing prices for rent at us. They wait for us to confirm how much we pay, and then claim that we are paying too much. If we are able to pay this much rent, then, of course, they need to know how much we earn at our jobs.

Denying answers to these types of questions has posed an issue as we like having good relations with our neighbors, and enjoy their company and conversation. But there are times in which you just have to learn to say “no”.

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Keywords: conversation with neighbor Chinese neighbor 6 Conversations You Never Thought You’d Have With Your Neighbors But Do talking with neighing neighbor conversation hutong neighbor

5 Comments

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zayabingi

i do agree with the last statement...the NEED TO SAY NO....

Dec 01, 2013 22:57 Report Abuse

Finbar

I've covered most these topics with neighbours/taxi drivers/random people walking up to me and taking an interest. Though I can understand some people feeling uncomfortable or annoyed when someone you barely know starts asking you weird or intimate questions, I usually enjoy talking to such people and elaborate as much on the subject as my limited Mandarin will allow me to. Things do get boring after a while, however, as once you stayed in China for a while, you will find that the majority of people you run into will ask you similar questions over and over. As I'm Dutch, too, I can relate to the football-related questions, and get very tired and annoyed with these rather easily (mainly because I couldn't give a shit less about football). Unfortunately, the three subjects mentioned most often are football, milk, flowers and, of course, marijuana. None of the subjects make for much of an interesting conversation (I like milk, but how much could I possibly discuss on the topic?), and this in combination with the number of time one has gone over the same subject (dozens, perhaps hundreds of times at this point) has gotten me to the point of simply fooling around with my phone when in a taxi, or turning around and walking away in any other situation. This might seem rude, or short-sighted, but it would take me longer to explain why I don't want to discuss the subjects than it would for them to get over the fact that I walked off.

Nov 28, 2013 16:34 Report Abuse

GuestBob

Do you have to do this?

Nov 25, 2013 10:27 Report Abuse

coineineagh

;-) It helps racially and culturally superior Chinese to understand why their country(wo)men would want to do such a thing. The reason is: They didn't!!! It may even have happened a few times, and it gets parrotted on as a shining beacon of hope for their contorted world views.

Nov 27, 2013 19:49 Report Abuse

coineineagh

All of this is plausible, except the part where she safely has an abortion. Chinese government hospitals promote one-child policy, and I've heard many tales of women who went there for a government-funded abortion, but ended up unable to conceive for the rest of their lives. Even if the procedure is done successfully with no resulting infertility, women really feel the toll on their bodies. The government really as people by the gonads, here. Contraception in China poses different health risks, too. Most women here are aware of this on some level, so it isn't quite as easy as you said. There are lots of scheming women out there, but if it does come to abortion, then somewhere along the way things didn't go according to plan. Such schemes would actually be safer to enact by women in western countries, so beware if the relationship focuses on living in the West *before* it gets serious. I made that mistake once, and am still recovering from it.

Nov 28, 2013 08:54 Report Abuse